All Quite on the Western Front (chapter 10-12) summary and analysis PDF

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All Quite on the Western Front (chapter 10-12) summary and analysis...

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All Quite on the Western Front (chapter 10-12) summary and analysis

Summary and Analysis Chapter 10 Summary Paul's luck appears to change when he is assigned, along with seven others, to guard a deserted village and supply dump. He is pleased to join Kat, Albert, Müller, Tjaden, Detering, and the rest, but mourns that Haie is no longer alive to share their good fortune. These few weeks are the last happy moments in the novel. Billeted in a cellar, Paul and his buddies create an "idyll" by rounding up blankets, a bed, eggs, butter, vegetables, and suckling pigs. With a homemade grater, they shred potatoes, which Paul cooks into cakes. While they are preparing their feast, the chimney smoke draws heavy enemy fire. The men quickly carry their loot to the dugout and spend the afternoon eating, drinking coffee, and smoking cigars; at six thirty, they eat supper. Throughout the night, they suffer diarrhea after gorging themselves on the rich pork and must dash outside to relieve their pained intestines. For almost three weeks, Paul's group is glad to have a soft job, so they continue to enjoy the good life — eating, drinking, and smoking cigars. Finally, they reluctantly board a transport to the front, bearing with them a four-poster bed, chairs, mattress, blue silk canopy, lace coverlets, as well as sausages, conserves, and cigarettes. They also take with them a kitten they have been feeding. As their column is sent to evacuate a village, Kropp catches a bullet a little above the knee. Paul is wounded in the leg and arm. Fleeing over a hedge into a mucky ditch, the men — Paul in the lead — head cross-country toward a dugout where they bind their wounds and size up their chances of recovery. A field ambulance evacuates them to a dressing station, and there they are vaccinated against tetanus. Albert worries about a leg amputation and Paul fights to keep his senses and not be chloroformed as the doctor examines him. The doctor removes shrapnel and appears to enjoy Paul's discomfort; he sets Paul's leg and informs him he will be going home. Afterward, Paul bribes the sergeant-major with cigars to keep him and Albert together. Transferred to an eight-man ward in a Catholic hospital, Paul awakens at seven o'clock the next morning to the sound of Morning Devotion. Albert shouts an order for quiet and the men hurl objects at the door so that the sisters will close the door and leave them in

peace. To the hospital inspector's questioning, Josef Hamacher, who receives special privileges because of a head injury, claims to have made the ruckus. During the night, while there is only one night sister on duty, the men ring repeatedly to report that Albert's wound is hemorrhaging. The next morning, Albert's face has yellowed from loss of blood. After Franz Wächter, the victim of a gunshot wound in the arm, is wheeled away on a gurney, Josef informs the others about the Dying Room, a separate space adjacent to the mortuary where seriously ill patients are taken to die. By afternoon, a new patient occupies Franz's bed. Little Peter, who suffers a lung injury, cries out belligerently that he will not be dumped in the Dying Room. Solemnly, Josef predicts that they will not see Peter again. The doctors at the hospital are portrayed as cruel and indifferent to suffering. Paul is operated on because his bones are not growing together. Josef warns him that the doctors love to operate because they have so many human guinea pigs. Eventually, more men die than will fit into the Dying Room. Then, amazingly, Peter returns from the Dying Room in triumph. Paul, overcome by the suffering around him, observes, "A hospital alone shows what war is." Albert's leg has been amputated at the thigh and he spends a great deal of time depressed, not speaking, and he says he would kill himself if given a gun. Once again Paul ponders what they will do after the war, because all they have known is killing. Paul turns his attention to Johann Lewandowski, a Polish soldier and the oldest patient, who has suffered a serious abdominal wound. Thrilled with a letter from his wife, Marja, he longs to see her and the child who was born during his two-year absence. Propped on a pillow after Marja arrives, Johann and his wife make love while the men play skat; two other men watch for intruders and Albert tends the baby. Remarque compresses much of Paul's convalescence into the closing paragraphs. Soon, Paul returns home on leave and again regrets having to leave his mother. Return to Second Company is less comforting without the presence of Albert, his best friend, who has gone to an institution that fits prosthetic limbs. Analysis As Paul recovers enough to walk about the hospital, he analyzes the impact of the war from another perspective. The experience of seeing so many hideous wounds, so many groaning, dying men forces him to ponder the great waste of the war, which extends throughout Germany, France, and Russia. Speaking for Remarque, he says, How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand

years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is. Paul broadens this thought out to his entire generation, no matter what country or side in the war. How will they ever go back to a civilian life they cannot comprehend? They went directly from school to killing. They do not even know what civilian life is supposed to be like as young adults. The entire chapter is filled with despair, death, and pain; the suffering of the men in the hospitals is only assuaged by the mercy of the sisters who tend them. One aspect of the chapter is hopeful, however. When Lewandowski's wife comes to visit with their child, she brings a ray of hope to the ward and to the story. In this shadow of death and suffering, the men join together to allow the couple some privacy so they can share their love. It is one bright bit of sunshine in a shadowy valley of gloom.

Summary and Analysis Chapter 11 Summary Back at the front in springtime, Paul perceives war as a kind of disease, "the cause of death like cancer and tuberculosis, like influenza and dysentery." His mind refuses to focus on the carnage, which leaves craters on both the physical and emotional landscape. No one remembers what existed prior to the war, and the only fleeting enjoyment is in the brotherhood of soldiers. Life is "limited to what is most necessary," such as whether to eat in case a later belly wound would be complicated by food. Paul tries to think of the positives and hang on to them "against the onslaught of nothingness." As time goes by, the shell between sanity and insanity is broken. The German line, buffeted into shreds, disintegrates into a "bitter struggle from crater to crater." So desperate do the men become as the English surround them that they urinate into the empty case that holds water to cool the machine gun. Detering sees a cherry tree blossoming in a garden and its reminder of wife and home cause him to desert. He is later caught and court-martialed. Berger illustrates a case of front-line madness. He leaves the crater and goes out a hundred yards to help a wounded messenger dog. Shot in the pelvis, he is brought back by a stretcher bearer who gets a leg wound. Müller is also dead. He is shot at point-blank range in the stomach and lives half an hour in terrible pain. He gives Paul his pocket-book and the boots that were worn so long ago by Kemmerich. Taking the boots, Paul grimly says that, after he himself dies, they will go to Tjaden.

Against a fresh supply of American and British adversaries, the German army bleeds its life away. The Germans are running out of shells, have too few horses, and are helpless against the new and menacing machines of war — Allied tanks. Firearms are in short supply and barrels wear down, distorting the soldiers' aim. Germany is so strapped for replacement troops that the army drafts young boys, who are of little use. Military surgeons are so eager to return men to battle that they stamp men A1 without examining them. Paul despises the "fraud, injustice, and baseness" in the army and also blames the German factory owners who are getting rich while putting sawdust in the rations, which rip out the soldiers' intestines. Lt. Bertinck, who has served as a worthy example for two years, dies while combating a flamethrower. The shot that hits his chin veers into Leer's hip and he bleeds to death. Paul bitterly recounts, "What use is it to him now that he was such a good mathematician at school." Spring becomes the wretched summer of 1918. Cognizant of Germany's heavy losses, Paul is keenly aware of life. His descriptions of nature allude to its natural presence amid the carnage: red poppies, smooth beetles, black and mystic trees, stars, and flowing water. Rumors of peace encourage him to hang on in hopes of an armistice. By now English and American planes outnumber Germany's fleet five to one. Paul summarizes, "We are not beaten, for as soldiers we are better and more experienced; we are simply crushed and driven back by overwhelming superior forces." Late in summer, Kat sustains a wound to the shin. Paul shoulders his buddy and hurries toward medical help, stopping occasionally to rest and reflect on their experiences. Because the two have been friends for nearly three years, Paul requests Kat's address so that they can remain in touch when they return to civilian life. Kat's condition worsens; Paul, without realizing that Kat has received a mortal wound to the skull, staggers on toward the dressing station. The orderly pronounces Kat "stone dead." Paul's mind, unable to cope with fatigue and, more importantly, the personal loss of his best friend, goes blank. Analysis The atmosphere of the final chapters grows more desperate. The German army and its soldiers, such as Kat and Paul, appear to be totally resigned to the futility of their situation. The Western Front is collapsing and many of the soldiers, represented by Detering and Berger, dissolve into madness. The past three years of their lives have been nothing but death, gas, horror, mud, rats, brutal scenes, shelling, desperation, and madness. Remarque constantly shells the reader with all of these things, as well as with the hopelessness and futility of war in general.

Paul alone, out of his original group of seven classmates, has survived, and now even his remaining support, Kat, is taken away from him. The only thing helping Paul survive was the brotherhood and comradeship of his friends. Now not even that is possible, and the loss of Kat is so great that Paul (or Remarque) cannot begin to describe it. When the orderly asks Paul if they are related, he says, "No, we are not related. No, we are not related." We see the bitter irony in his reply, because much earlier Paul said of their tie, "I belong to them and they to me; we all share the same fear and the same life, we are nearer than lovers, in a simpler, a harder way. . . ."

Summary and Analysis Chapter 12 Summary Now it is Autumn of 1918. All talk is of peace and an armistice. Resting for fourteen days because he swallowed some gas, Paul considers the possibility that an armistice means they can go home. But what is home? He and his whole generation have no goals, no aims, no passion for life and no direction. Sadly, Paul mentions that the generation before and after his had a civilian life as young adults; his generation does not. The days and years will pass and he will be alone without fear or hope. Then Paul must go back to the front, alone. The narrative suddenly changes to third person as if someone else is telling the story. October 1918, a month before the armistice, Paul dies at the front; he did not suffer and there was an expression of calm on his face as though he was glad the end had come. Analysis As the plot moves inexorably toward a conclusion, Remarque, becoming more philosophical and less objective, omits details of Paul's gas injury, two-week leave, return to the front, and fatal wound. Even the setting of the garden in which he convalesces is ambiguous. By this point, details have receded in importance. For Paul and the other veterans, bestiality and carnage have usurped three years of their lives, leaving empty, aimless men to be the future generation of Germans. A compelling cry of abandonment, Paul's final words, "I am so alone," summarize the treachery of war, an insidious malaise that obliterates all ties with life, leaving an empty, dehumanized husk, which bears no will to live. The final bitter irony is the quiet and stillness on the day of Paul's death: ". . . the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front."...